Winter King Read online

  What readers are saying about the Sabazel series

  “. . . I love this book. A functioning Amazonian society with a kickass queen, navigating the waters of political alliance and war? Sign my silly butt up. This is one of those books I read every few years, and I’m always pleasantly surprised by how good it is each time.”—Lilith Saintcrow, author of the Dante Valentine series, on Sabazel

  “. . . a marvelous sense of romantic adventure . . . unusually literate, intelligent and respectfully aware of the epic tradition . . . strong characterizations complimented by an evocative magical poetry in the imagery . . . plausibility in action and locale . . . use of Classical background assured and distinctive . . . firmly grounded in reality, tradition and myth.”—Robert Hadji, Borderland

  Other notable authors on The Winter King:

  A remarkably fine and thoroughly engrossing book.—Patricia C. Wrede

  Original, imaginative, and believable.—Elizabeth Ann Scarborough.

  A compelling story. I read it through the night.—R.A. MacAvoy

  The Winter King

  Sabazel, Book Two

  Lillian Stewart Carl

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011 by Lillian Stewart Carl

  This book is available in print at most online retailers

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  Chapter One

  The aged walls of Iksandarun reverberated to a volley of hoofbeats. Couriers raced out of the west and plunged through the gates, scattering the market goers with cries of alarm. A lathered horse fell dead in the dust before the palace. The couriers swayed with exhaustion in the presence of their emperor, delivering dire news. The Khazyari had burst from the distant legendary Mohan Valley like maggots from a rotten peach. The Crimson Horde had swarmed across the borders of the Empire.

  The Emperor Marcos Bellasteros listened, his features sternly attentive. He asked several pointed questions. He thanked the messengers and saw to their comfort, and then quickly sent for his generals. In the eighteen years since he had conquered the Empire, he had built it almost to its former prosperity; if it was his glory, it was also his burden.

  Bellasteros, king of kings, god-king, sat that night in his private chambers. His only son, named Andrion, beloved of the gods, sat with long limbs knotted at his father’s feet. “These horsemen,” stated the emperor, his brow furrowed by the depth of his thought, “come around the end of the mountains, from nowhere, moving faster than seems possible. And the Empire is weak. The years since your birth have not been enough to mend it. It has absorbed us, its Sardian conquerors, and while we have strengthened it, we have not healed it.”

  His voice died, refusing to speak words of doom. His dark eyes, flickering with a distant flame, pierced the night that cloaked the window as if watching the Khazyari make their implacable advance from the western steppes, through the rich valley of the Mohan, to the borders of the Empire itself. The diadem of the emperor gleamed in his sable hair.

  Andrion’s rich brown eyes were his father’s; his bones were his mother’s, light, strong, square. His face was his own, pure marble yet to be sculpted by time and fate. “Should we go to the winter capital in Farsahn? We could stop in Sabazel for the midsummer rites.” This time, he thought, perhaps Dana will come to me. The fine, almost delicate line of his mouth twitched into a smile and then tightened, denying retreat.

  “Sabazel,” Bellasteros murmured. His gaze softened. He stroked his son’s dark auburn hair, assuring himself the young man really existed. And he laughed, dryly, without bitterness, his teeth glinting white in the sable of his beard. “Yes, Andrion, we have lived our lives on the borders of Sabazel, not quite within, not quite without. If only we could go there and lay our worries in the lap of our mother, the goddess Ashtar. But I am emperor; I cannot hide from distasteful duty. I fear we shall have other rites to celebrate come midsummer.”

  A wind sighed through the window, caressing Andrion’s upturned face, teasing him with the scents of lemon and orange blossoms. Spring in Iksandarun; spring in Sabazel, and the soft odor of asphodel to sear the senses.

  Bellasteros leaned back in his chair. “I shall set two legions in the path of the Khazyari, and send to Patros in Sardis for reinforcements; if worse comes to worst, we can fall back before them, shut ourselves behind the walls of Iksandarun and wait.” The lines on his brow deepened with a painful irony. “These horsemen pour in from the west, but the defenses of the Empire have always looked to the north, to Sardis. Justice, perhaps, but I shall not accept such judgment.” He set his jaw, raised his chin, squared his lean and powerful shoulders.

  Andrion raised his own face to search the darkness outside, but it was impenetrable. And I am the emperor’s son, he thought. Born on the day of victory, on the cusp of winter eighteen years ago. Now spring gives birth to summer with a rumor not of life but of death. Bellasteros, the summer king.

  Suddenly the wind veered, filling his nostrils with the sharp-sweet scent of blood, and he shivered.

  * * * * *

  The mountains, rank upon shadowed rank, supported the vault of the night sky, the western vault behind the Khazyari camp. The mountains still marked the borders of the Empire, but they no longer protected it. Circumvented, they seemed to slump, fading into a dark and indistinguishable horizon.

  A band of Khazyari warriors and their sturdy steppe ponies trotted over a slight rise. In the midst of the group, a cloaked figure bounced on its horse like an ungainly insect. When the escort reined up, the figure emitted an audible groan.

  A white pony moved ghostlike through the night. Its rider signed peremptorily; with respectful gestures the other warriors faded back, becoming only shadows flitting among the rocks and brush of the plain.

  The Khazyari rider approached the solitary cloaked figure. “Hilkar, chamberlain of the court,” he said mockingly, in lightly accented common speech. “Is all in readiness?”

  Hilkar swept back the hood of his cloak. His face was thin, his pale jowls dangling loosely in the starlight, like dead fish. “My lord Tembujin. I intercepted the orders of Bellasteros to General Aveyron, as you asked. I have ridden all the way from Iksandarun—”

  “Which is not far.” The warrior adjusted the short bow he carried. He propped one leather-booted foot on his pony’s shoulder. His bright black eyes scanned the darkness, not Hilkar’s face, naming Hilkar only some insignificant creature of the night. “Yes?”

  “Two legions, set on either side of the old caravan route,” said Hilkar. And louder, trying to draw the Khazyari’s eye, “They mean to catch your forces between them.”

  The warrior laughed. He waved his hand, indicating the watchfires of the Khazyari camp spread as lavishly across the ground as the stars across the sky, indicating a dying moon that hung low in the east, shedding no light upon Iksandarun.

  Hilkar swallowed hard. He slipped what looked like a bolt of cloth from a bag on his saddle. “Here, my lord. A gift from your loyal servant, so you may remember me after your victory.”

  Tembujin lazily reached out, took the cloth, shook it. A cloak, its crimson darkened into deep carnelian by the night, billowed over the flanks of his pony as it was tossed by a sudden breeze. “Yes?”

  “Bellasteros’s cloak. To enspell him. He is strong, my lord.”

  “True. He defeated you, did h
e not?”

  Hilkar’s reedy voice tightened bitterly. “He defeated the Empire and made it his own. He could not defeat my spirit. All these years I have waited for vengeance.”

  The Khazyari folded the cloak and placed it between his thigh and his saddle. “Open the gates of Iksandarun for us, and you shall have your vengeance.”

  “My lord!” Hilkar gasped. “That would be . . .”

  “Difficult? Dangerous? No more dangerous than talking to me, traitor.” The warrior smiled slowly, and his long lashes bristled about his eyes.

  Hilkar groveled as best he could on horseback. “Yes, my lord. Yes, my prince. I ask only my due reward.”

  “That, too, you shall have.” With an elaborate yawn Tembujin straightened, turned his pony, signaled to the escort. Spears and arrows stirred the night. “And I am not your prince,” he said over his shoulder.

  Hilkar quailed back, nodding and bowing, sputtering assurances of loyalty, flattering phrases, protestations of his own worth. The Khazyari warriors gathered around him, swept him up, carried him eastward into the night. His voice dissipated down the wind.

  The moon, a pale, wasted crescent, abandoned Iksandarun. The warrior prince trotted, smiling, down into his encampment.

  * * * * *

  On the night of the midsummer moon Bellasteros’s prescience was fulfilled. The shattered legions fell back to Iksandarun in little more than a rout. To the unbelieving citizens the gates of the city seemed to open by themselves. The sounds of battle echoed in the passageways of the palace.

  Andrion leaned against the arched doorway of the throne room, forcing gulps of acrid air past his clenched teeth. The necklace he wore, a gold crescent moon with a gold star at its tip, leaped and sparked in the sweat pooled at his throat. His face was smudged, the linen chiton and draped cloak he wore were torn, the short Sardian sword he held was stained crimson. The Crimson Horde, he thought. Khazyari blood was as red as that of his own people.

  “By all the gods,” he said between his teeth, part curse, part prayer, “if I ever find who betrayed the legions and opened the gates, I shall cut out his heart, I shall stain the ancient altar of the temple with his blood as it was bloodied by traitors on the night of my birth!”

  But no, his father had banned human sacrifice that very night. Andrion gulped again. His companions, sons of servants and noblemen alike, had pushed him from the battle in the streets into the momentary safety of the palace. His cloak was pinned with a brooch styled like the wings of the god Harus, and the gold necklace circled his throat; his identity was all too obvious. So he had gone, he had fled his companions, and their death screams were taunting wraiths in the air before him. Andrion, the prince, the heir, his life bought with blood . . . “I swear,” he cried, “I shall avenge you!”

  Voices echoed within the throne room. Andrion turned. There, at the opposite end of the long, empty chamber, their forms winking fitfully in crimson lamplight, stood General Aveyron and his emperor.

  Bellasteros sat stiffly against the glory of the peacock throne, his face scored by runnels of pain. He was not coiled like a hunting cat, blazing with anger and majesty; he was silent, his temper strangely eroded, the diadem only a band of embers on the dark hearth of his hair. He held the sword Solifrax, the gods’ gift of power that was his alone to bear, unsheathed across his lap. The crystalline blade dripped red on the tile floor, blood spreading around the throne.

  The general held his helmet under his arm politely, but he spoke friend to friend, his body straining forward in desperate, disbelieving urgency. “The city is burning. The Khazyari run like ravening wolves through the streets. The women’s wing of the palace has fallen, and the temple citadel.”

  Shouts and screams and a crash of masonry echoed down the corridor. Andrion spun about; the Khazyari had brought a battering ram to the main door. If the old emperors had not built their palace as a fortress, it would already be over, his throat bared to the knife on the merciless stone of the altar. Death, and peace in the arms of the goddess—beloved of the gods, indeed! No, death was too easy.

  The tapestries on the walls of the throne room seemed to smoke faintly, their images muted, as if at any moment they would burst into flame and disappear. The outstretched wings of Sardian Harus were broken; the mountain and pool of Sabazian Ashtar were muddied beyond cleansing. Gods, Andrion thought, shaking himself, even my own senses betray me.

  Aveyron’s voice was low and hoarse. “Your first wife, my lord. The lady Chryse. She and your daughter Sarasvati have thrown themselves from the battlements and dashed themselves to death in the courtyard rather than face the Horde.”

  Bellasteros closed his eyes. A muscle jumped in his jaw and his shoulders tightened in a long, sustained shiver. Solifrax glinted red, reflecting the pool of blood at his feet.

  Andrion laid his cheek against the cool marble of the wall, his long, anguished breath clouding the stone. Chryse, the gentle sparrow, that one of his mothers who had guided his steps and mended his childhood wounds; Sarasvati, his spirited half-sister, less than a year younger than he.

  “Declan. the high priest of Harus . . .” Aveyron inhaled shakily. “Declan Falco lies dead in the temple courtyard, one of the falcon standards smashed in his shattered hand.”

  Andrion’s fingers tightened convulsively on the hilt of his sword. Declan, too, wise tutor and compassionate friend; the darkness of this night consumed all hope. Tears burned the back of his throat and he choked them down into the void that had been his heart. He lived, and he would not weep.

  Bellasteros opened his eyes. Their dark luster was dimmed, shadowed by defeat and death; the Sardian Conqueror was himself conquered. “So,” he murmured with a quiet brutality, “the payment has come due; the sacrifice of the summer king. If only it were me alone, and not my people.”

  “Gods!” Andrion hissed. This despairing old man was not his father. It could not be his father. He would not let it be his father.

  Another crash. The palace shuddered. A frescoed wall cracked and the images painted on it disintegrated. The hero Daimion and his companion Mari, queen of Sabazel, the hero Bellasteros and his companion Danica, queen of Sabazel, were becoming flakes of ash drifting like dead leaves to the floor.

  Aveyron stepped onto the edge of the dais and seized his emperor by the arm. “My lord, no. You and the prince must escape. I let the barbarians turn my flank; I let them waste the legions. I shall stay and pay for my failure while you live for another day.”

  “No, Aveyron, old friend, not your failure.” Bellasteros laid his hand on Aveyron’s.

  Aveyron shook away reassurance. “You and the prince must escape. The long leagues of the Empire lie before you, and Farsahn and Sardis beyond. You must live, so the Empire will live.”

  “Will your death buy the Empire? Will mine?” Bellasteros for a moment looked into the glistening face of his general, looked into the face of Death. And he shuddered, throwing off some subtle choking drowsiness, waking the lean strength of his body. His eyes cleared and sparked into the numinous glow of the god-touched. He leaped from the throne. “Andrion,” he said, his voice firm. “The prince. Where is he?”

  That was his father. “I am here,” Andrion called. With a tight smile more wary than relieved, he strode up the length of the audience chamber. His steps were only a faint patter on the floor.

  Aveyron stepped back with a bow. Bellasteros rose, extending his hand, and Andrion placed his stained and dirty hand in his father’s. Warm flesh touched warm flesh, the same sinew, the same bone. “You must live,” the emperor said to his son. “I bought your life when you were born the winter king and were to have died for me. Now my life is due.”

  “No, no! I shall not go without you. You are the Empire. You are hope.” Andrion tightened his grasp as if he could pull his father bodily from this evil despair. “I shall not go alone.”

  “I cannot go,” said Bellasteros. The same stubborn will, no matter how oddly distorted. A slight frown marred the c
lean planes of his face, his words not quite his own.

  “No,” Andrion said aloud, his jaw set. He had never dared such defiance. He had never needed to. “The Empire is more than Iksandarun. It is your place to carry the sword and the diadem to safety. To Sabazel, my lord, my father; ever our refuge.” Inwardly he cringed; no one had ever before had to tell Bellasteros his duty.

  Solifrax, drained of blood, gleamed palely. A slow breeze stirred the gathered smoke, carrying in it a resonance of chimes, faint and disordered; the wind plucked at Andrion’s tunic and stirred his hair. Andrion met his father’s eyes, willing him to hear, and Bellasteros’s eyes darkened in comprehension. For just a moment Andrion sagged, and then squared himself yet again.

  An echoing crash shook the building. Shouts and cries flooded the corridors. The moment shattered. “Go,” Aveyron insisted. “I will guard your back. In Ashtar’s name. in the name of Harus, go now.”

  “So be it then,” stated Bellasteros. “Perhaps the gods intend my death, but I have defied them before.” He set aside Andrion’s hand and glanced about him, a bright-eyed falcon seeking its prey.

  Aveyron knelt at his emperor’s feet. For just a moment his back bowed wearily. “My thanks, lord, for the honors you have given me.”

  “Well earned, my friend.” Bellasteros’s voice clotted. He lifted the curved blade of Solifrax and set its gleam on the general’s shoulder in benediction. “May you feast this night in paradise.”

  Aveyron pulled himself to attention. He settled his helmet again on his head. His face was stark, gaunt, as if the skull already tightened the skin to nothingness. “My lord.” He flourished his sword in salute, and he was gone.